Tuesday, 6 February 2018

Public Health England swallows £4.5bn of our taxes each year. It spends it on such frivolity as telling us when the sun is coming out, bending science to pretend we're all drinking too much, and embarking on campaigns that are arguably dangerous, as this video shows.

The one area, though, where they have appeared vaguely sensible has always been with e-cigs, but today they have shown that they haven't the first clue about smokers and vapers at all. Via the BBC:

E-cigarettes should be available on prescription, according to Public Health England (PHE).

The agency wants them to be prescribed on the NHS within the next few years because of how successful they have been in helping people give up smoking.

Smokers are not sick. They don't need curing. This fundamentally misunderstands the attraction of vaping, it's like PHE have been sleepwalking through the past decade.

People who have stopped smoking by switching to e-cigs have done so precisely because they don't have to attend a clinic and drink weak tea with some dreary stop smoking adviser. They use e-cigs because they made their own decision, spent their own money, and chose their own device. Why PHE think it's beneficial to drag the whole process back in-house so that taxpayers can write cheques to vaping manufacturers is anyone's guess. Medicinal e-cigs is a nonsensical idea and PHE are stupid if they recommend it.

Martin Dockerell (sic), tobacco control lead for PHE, said: "We are saying no smoking anywhere on the grounds [of hospitals], no smoking in the smoking shelter - that shelter becomes a vaping shelter.

Yes, because coercion is stock in trade for tobacco control, they just cannot imagine the concept of people making their own choices. They know a lot about the stick but have never heard of a carrot.

This is the problem with tobacco control, control is the operative word because the industry refuses to accept that smokers - just like all people - like to make decisions for themselves, not be forced into them. All this will do is create enmity between smokers and vapers, it is a pile of donkey cock.

We paid for this. We paid for PHE to exhibit their utter ignorance of smokers and vapers to the world.

Of course, what this really shows is that PHE - no matter how friendly they appear on e-cigs - cannot break the shackles of a 'public health' industry mindset that is wedded to ordering people about instead of advising them. Their report today was a great opportunity to educate the public and recommend e-cigs, but they just had to put a big authoritarian Doc Marten boot through the whole thing and fuck it up.

Let's get that £4.5bn back and put it in the NHS, because it's being thrown down the shitter at the moment by the clowns at PHE.